HOLIDAY WRAP

It’s an unusually crowded Christmas week for movie releases; here, very briefly, are two that I caught up with:

The Adventures of Tintin—Steven Spielberg directed this animation of the Belgian comic books by Hergé. The title character, voiced by Jamie Bell, is a Poil de Carotte boy reporter who gets caught up in an intrigue involving a ship in a bottle, car & motorcycle chases, hidden treasure, pirates, pickpockets, mirages, a glass-cracking opera singer, etc. etc. Working from a script by Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, Spielberg is in masterly form here, even if the most vivid character in the film—by far, really—is Tintin’s dog Snowy ("Milou"), always way ahead of the action & saving the day.

We Bought a Zoo—The title is the answer to a question: What did you do because of your grief over your wife’s untimely death? Desperate to reconnect with his kids, Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) buys a rundown rural California animal park that comes handily equipped with Scarlett Johansson as head keeper. The script, very loosely adapted from Mee’s memoir by Aline Brosh McKenna & director Cameron Crowe, freely mixes broad comedy & teen romance with pretty somber bereavement drama. The result isn’t quite the lightweight entertainment that it's being marketed as, & it’s a little overlong, but on the whole it’s an agreeable picture, well-acted & beautifully shot, & though Crowe doesn’t allow them to upstage the humans, the animals are lovely.

RIP to Robert Easton, passed on at 81. A veteran character actor whose credits ranged from The Red Badge of Courage to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to The Giant Spider Invasion, he’s most famous as one of Hollywood’s busiest dialect & accent coaches.

Finally, a wistful note: My pal the Midnite Movie Mamacita has announced that her venue The Royale in downtown Mesa will be closing permanently at the end of business Christmas Eve, after just six lively & memorable months. This comes two months after the closing of Farrelli’s on Scottsdale Road; Barry Graham suspects here that FilmBar downtown could be the next to go.

Best of luck to the Mamacita on whatever her next venture may be. The Royale’s final selection is, appropriately, both seasonal & deeply f**ked-up: Black Christmas, a Canadian horror picture of 1974 (the French-Canadian version was known as Un Noel Tragique). Employing techniques that John Carpenter would popularize four years later in Halloween, this influential film offers us the POV of a panting, slavering maniac stalking a sorority house just before Christmas break, ogling such residents as Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin. John Saxon plays the cop, and Keir Dullea is on hand as a creepy pianist.

Though it's no more realistic than any other slasher movie, this one has a pervasive luridness that makes it a really queasy, unsettling piece of work, and somehow the queasiness is magnified by the fact that it shares a director, the late Bob Clark, with that warmest, funniest, most beloved of Christmas movies, 1983's A Christmas Story. It might be called The Anti-Christmas Story.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to all, & to all of us, a lifetime of Christmases infinitely merrier than the one depicted in that film.

MY TWO CENT(IPEDE)S

Moviemakers who deal in extreme or sadistic violence have been known to defensively pooh-pooh the notion that their work might inspire real-life imitators. But Tom Six, Dutch writer-director of last year’s disgusting-but-compelling The Human Centipede (First Sequence), is afflicted with no such modesty. The main character of his “meta” follow-up, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), is an obsessed fan of the original who seeks not only to reproduce the atrocity depicted therein, but to expand upon it.

For the (perhaps fortunate) unitiated: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was about a German surgeon (the unforgettable Dieter Laser) who for no particular reason other than to see if it could be accomplished, created a human “Siamese triplet,” with a gastric tract running mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus, out of two young American women & a Japanese man he'd taken captive. The Doc met a bloody fate at the end, & it appeared that the three members of his pathetic creation were also doomed, so it was hard to grasp how a sequel would work.

Here’s how: The protagonist of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), opening today at The Royale in Mesa, is Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a gnome-like attendant in a featureless & very poorly supervised London “car park” (parking garage). Martin lives in a shabby little flat with his horrible ratbag of a mother (Vivien Bridson), who blames her son for the imprisonment of his sexually abusive father. His other roommate is a large centipede in a terrarium, which his loathsome psychologist (Bill Hutchens) suggests may be a phallic symbol representing his rage over his father’s abuse.

Martin obsessively watches Human Centipede the first on his computer screen at work, & keeps a scrapbook devoted to the film. He even takes seriously the movie’s tongue-in-cheek hype line: “100% Medically Accurate.”

Indeed, Martin seems determined to put this claim to the test. He keeps abducting people, & secreting them, bound & gagged, on the floor of a rented warehouse. His victims include customers who are rude to him at the car park, among others—he even lures Ashlynn Yennie, one of the actresses from the first film, to London with the offer of an audition for Quentin Tarantino.

Martin’s plan is to construct his own, highly ambitious human centipede, this one consisting of twelve subjects. The second half of the film is excruciatingly devoted to his efforts to complete this gruesome task—without, of course, any surgical skills or training & with workshop tools instead of surgical instruments.

So, how to review this thing? It’s both so revolting—it’s much, much more graphically gory than the first film—& so ridiculous that I found much of it almost unwatchable, & might have shut it off if I wasn’t reviewing it. I can’t say I found it particularly enriching, or that I think the world would be a notably poorer place if it didn’t exist.

Having said that, I must admit that this is by no means an artless piece of moviemaking. In some ways, it’s perhaps a more unified, less obviously padded-out piece of work than the original. Six achieves a despairing, Dante-esque horror at times, in the images of Martin’s writhing victims.

Harvey, too, is a potent presence as Martin. Unless I missed it, he never speaks a word in the film, but he has the unsettling stillness of a Beckett clown, & his face can erupt with homicidal rage or grief or glee. He’s one creepy little nudnik.

I wouldn’t blame any critic who didn’t care to split the hair that separates The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) from blackhearted torture-porn trash. But I will; I can’t quite dismiss the movie as that. I can acknowledge, at some level even admire, Six’s talent, & the transgressive vision that gave rise to this ghastly worm-that-turns fantasy.

But that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it, or that, to anyone other than a hardcore-horror completist, I’d recommend it. Six got what he wanted out of me with this movie—he won. As with A Serbian Film a few months ago, at some point I gave up on these victims & just wanted the movie over. I just barely was able to, you know, leg this one out.

MOUTHS OF BABES

Saturday evening at The Royale in Mesa, The Midnite Movie Mamacita revives the sick-ass, unforgettable Tom Six film The Human Centipede (First Sequence), in preparation for the meta-sequel, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), out later this month. You can read my review of the first film here, & if you’re not squeamish, see the trailer for the new film here.

A pal directed me these remarkable clips of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, before the voice of Mercedes McCambridge was overdubbed. The finished clips are presented afterwards, for a compare & contrast. What do you think? For me, it truly shows how much McCambridge added to that film.

ROYALE WATCHING

Sunday afternoon Your Humble Narrator & The Kid betook ourselves to The Royale, the Midnite Movie Mamacita’s nouveau-grindhouse in downtown Mesa, for a screening of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory benefitting Kids Need to Read. Not for the first time, I was struck by how really messed-up, on many different levels, that movie is, in spite (& at times because of) Gene Wilder’s classic turn as Wonka.

But it was a lot of fun anyway, & I swelled with pride to see my two contributions to The Royale’s décor. First, this poster for the 1955 Republic serial Panther Girl of the Kongo, starring sexy Phyllis Coates:

Seeing this so prominently displayed in the lobby delighted me, because it was a legacy from my dear late pal & mentor Bill Rocz, who passed on in 1996. Valley folk will remember Bill as the movie critic at Channel 5 & host of that station’s Family Classics & Hollywood Greats. I had enjoyed the Panther Girl in my home office for years, but there was no place she fit in our current house, & she had been in storage for more than five years. I can think of few places that Bill would more wish to see her than her new home.

The Royale has also offered shelter to The Great Shuggahoo, a big wooden Tiki that hung over my desk for years, but who was also out of place—according to The Wife—in the current Moorhead Hacienda. Shuggahoo (named after an alien ruler in some head comic I read decades ago) has an important gig at The Royale—guarding the commode:

He looks pretty sullen about the detail, wouldn’t you say?

TROLLING THUNDER REVUE

It is immensely cheering to report that, just a few months after downtown’s FilmBar, another repertory cinema is opening here in the Valley: The Midnite Movie Mamacita at last has a Room of Her Own, on Main Street in downtown Mesa: The Royale. The venue “soft opened” two weekends ago with Hobo With a Shotgun, but the official Grand Opening is this weekend, & the lineup includes Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness & Andre Ovredal’s Trollhunter.

Raimi’s slapstick horror epic is an essential, no doubt. But I would also heartily recommend Trollhunter (Trolljegeren), a wry Norwegian combination of The Blair Witch Project with Peer Gynt & The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

It begins precisely in the Blair Witch format, with the conceit that we’re seeing recovered footage of two guys & a woman, film students, venturing into the wilderness to make a documentary. They think the mysterious subject they’re tracking is a poacher—an unlicensed bear-hunter. But when they catch up with Hans (Otto Jespersen, who’s excellent), the bearded, dour guy in the beat-up Land Rover, they learn that he’s out there hunting trolls. With difficulty, they talk him into letting them tag along with their cameras.

At first they think Hans is crazy, of course, but soon they learn that he’s on the level, & indeed that he’s on a secret government contract to exterminate any troll that wanders off its range. All this is handled so nonchalantly that it seems perfectly plausible.

The trick with Blair Witch, however, was that you never really saw anything at all. That’s where Trollhunter parts company with its model: When the trolls finally show up in this movie, they show up big time, in spectacularly-rendered computer animation. I was sure that this would result in diminishing returns—that the later manifestations would inevitably be less awe-inspiring than the first few. But the later sequences have tension & imagination & spooky grandeur.

I can’t say that Trollhunter deeply frightened me, the way Blair Witch did the first time I saw it, probably because Ovredal plays the film much more overtly for satire—though the actors keep splendidly straight faces—& also because trolls aren’t the culturally hardwired objects of terror for most of us as they might be for a Scandinavian viewer. But even if you didn’t grow up alongside a fiord, you’re likely to find Trollhunter a tense & exciting & witty fantasy.